Reduced Laughter

Download or read book Reduced Laughter written by Helen Paynter and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-05-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Helen Paynter offers a radical re-evalution of the central section of Kings. Reading with attention to the literary devices of carnivalization and mirroring, she demonstrates that it contains a florid satire on kings, prophets and nations. Building on the work of humorists, literary critics and biblical scholars, the author constructs diagnostic criteria for carnivalization (seriocomedy), and identifies an abundance of these features within the Elijah/Elisha and Aram narratives, showing how literary mirroring further enhances their satirical effect. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars concerned with the Hebrew Bible as literature but will be valued by those who favour more historical approaches for its insights into the Hebrew text.

Download or read book Dimensions of Laughter in Crime and Punishment written by John Spiegel and published by Susquehanna University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Since human laughter served, in a sense, as Dostoevsky's model, the author pays some heed to the highly controversial subject of real-life laughter, along with the leading theories that seek to elucidate its causes and implications.".

Download or read book Mikhail Bakhtin written by Gary Saul Morson and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 1108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Books about thinkers require a kind of unity that their thought may not possess. This cautionary statement is especially applicable to Mikhail Bakhtin, whose intellectual development displays a diversity of insights that cannot be easily integrated or accurately described in terms of a single overriding concern. Indeed, in a career spanning some sixty years, he experienced both dramatic and gradual changes in his thinking, returned to abandoned insights that he then developed in unexpected ways, and worked through new ideas only loosely related to his earlier concerns Small wonder, then, that Bakhtin should have speculated on the relations among received notions of biography, unity, innovation, and the creative process. Unity--with respect not only to individuals but also to art, culture, and the world generally--is usually understood as conformity to an underlying structure or an overarching scheme. Bakhtin believed that this idea of unity contradicts the possibility of true creativity. For if everything conforms to a preexisting pattern, then genuine development is reduced to mere discovery, to a mere uncovering of something that, in a strong sense, is already there. And yet Bakhtin accepted that some concept of unity was essential. Without it, the world ceases to make sense and creativity again disappears, this time replaced by the purely aleatory. There would again be no possibility of anything meaningfully new. The grim truth of these two extremes was expressed well by Borges: an inescapable labyrinth could consist of an infinite number of turns or of no turns at all. Bakhtin attempted to rethink the concept of unity in order to allow for the possibility of genuine creativity. The goal, in his words, was a "nonmonologic unity," in which real change (or "surprisingness") is an essential component of the creative process. As it happens, such change was characteristic of Bakhtin's own thought, which seems to have developed by continually diverging from his initial intentions. Although it would not necessarily follow that the development of Bakhtin's thought corresponded to his ideas about unity and creativity, we believe that in this case his ideas on nonmonologic unity are useful in understanding his own thought--as well as that of other thinkers whose careers are comparably varied and productive.

Download or read book Parody written by Margaret A. Rose and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-09-09 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this definitive work Margaret Rose presents an analysis and history of theories and uses of parody from ancient to contemporary times and offers a new approach to the analysis and classification of modern, late-modern, and post-modern theories of the subject. The author's Parody/Meta-Fiction (1979) was influential in broadening awareness of parody as a 'double-coded' device which could be used for more than mere ridicule. In the present study she both expands and revises the introductory section of her 1979 text and adds substantial new sections on modern and post-modern theories and uses of parody and pastiche which also discuss the work of theorists and writers including the Russian formalists, Mikhail Bakhtin, Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Ihab Hassan, Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, A. S. Byatt, Martin Amis, Charles Jencks, Umberto Eco, David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury and others.

Download or read book Loopholes written by John Bruns and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much writing about comedy in the last twenty years has only trivialized comedy as cheap or as temporary distraction from things that "really matter." It has either presented exhaustive taxonomies of kinds of humor--like wit, puns, jokes, humor, satire, irony--or engaged in pointless political endgames, moral dialogues, or philosophical perceptions. Comedy is rarely presented as a mode of thought in its own right, as a way of understanding, not something to be understood. Bruns' guiding assumption is that comedy is not simply a literary or theatrical genre, to be diff erentiated from tragedy or from romance, but a certain way of disclosing, perhaps undoing, the way the world is organized. When we view the world in terms of what is incompatible, we are reading comically. In this sense, comedy exists outside the alternatives of tragic and comic. Loopholes argues that trivialization of comedy comes from fear that it will address our anxieties with honesty-- and it is this truth that scares us. John Bruns discusses comedy as a mode of thought with a cognitive function. It is a domain of human understanding, a domain far more troubling and accessible than we care to acknowledge. To "read comically" we must accept our fears. If we do so, we will realize what Bruns refers to as the most neglected premise of comedy, that the world itself is a loophole--both incomplete and limitless.

Download or read book Anatomy of an Illness As Perceived By the Patient written by Norman Cousins and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2005-07-12 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of a recovery from a crippling disease and the physician patient partnership that beat the odds by using the patient's own capabilities.

Download or read book Rabelais and His World written by Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic work by the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) examines popular humor and folk culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. One of the essential texts of a theorist who is rapidly becoming a major reference in contemporary thought, Rabelais and His World is essential reading for anyone interested in problems of language and text and in cultural interpretation.